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Lot Essay
I can’t say another word about the pictorial uses of colour except to paraphrase a letter I wrote to a friend long ago talking about a visit to Naples, ‘two or three smudges of blue and green paint rubbed into this wooden panel, and I begin to feel I am there - Howard Hodgkin
I have a feeling that it is only in the Anglo-Saxon world that sunsets are to be described as ‘vulgar’. And I think the reason why is because of the connotations of the colour of sunset. Sunsets, after all, are very red, very orange, which at the red end of the spectrum are the colours of tumescence - Howard Hodgkin
This striking, intimately scaled painting is a jewel from Howard Hodgkin’s sustained meditations on Naples. In Hodgkin’s deeply idiosyncratic pictorial language, Naples is not merely a place but a state of mind; a vessel for indulgence, desire, and reverie. At its apex burns a molten Italian sun, bleeding gold into a deepening cadmium-orange haze that sears the sky with heat. Along the upper edge, a whisper of blue signals the approaching dusk. Two swathes of turquoise-green, smeared along either side, frame and steady the composition, while the wooden frame itself, streaked with black pigment, spills into the picture plane. Its darkened borders intimate the encroachment of the night. The central tricolour division dominates, holding these chromatic extremes in taut balance, the entire surface charged with emotional voltage.
For an artist so frequently described as a painter of emotional states, this remark is characteristically pointed. It acknowledges the sensual charge of colour while confronting the cultural unease that such intensity can provoke. Unapologetic in their saturation, Hodgkin’s sunsets distil and savour his most precious associations with place. In Venice Sunset (1989), he similarly explores the intensity of hue, balancing sensuality with contemplation. Emerging from a period of profound personal transition – marked by his separation from his wife in the mid-1970s and his growing acknowledgement of his homosexuality – Sunset in Naples precedes the enduring partnership he would form with the writer Anthony Peattie in 1984. Seen in the context of the artist’s life at this juncture, the chromatic temperature of the present work acquires an unavoidable eroticism. In the related and suggestively titled Waking Up in Naples (1980-84), the southern Italian setting is again alluded to as a site for renewed desire and emotional discovery.
As he wrote to John Elderfield after a visit to Naples, ‘…two or three smudges of blue and green paint rubbed into this wooden panel, and I begin to feel I am there’ (H. Hodgkin, London, 13 February 1995, in J. Elderfield and H. Hodgkin, ‘An Exchange’, Howard Hodgkin Paintings, London, 1995, p. 73). The remark is disarmingly simple, yet it cuts to the core of his practice: painting as an instrument of return. Profoundly sincere in his work, Hodgkin laboured slowly and deliberately, often over years, adjusting colour and structure until a memory settled into its final form. The wooden frames, which, as John McEwen observed, offered something ‘contrarily solid and relatively indestructible’, were not incidental but essential: durable, resistant surface for impressions by nature fleeting (J. McEwen, exhibition catalogue, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings 1973-84, British Pavilion, XLI Venice Biennale, 1984, p. 9). Here, the frame acts as both protector and container, holding the warmth of remembered experience within its fixed embrace. In this tension between the ephemeral and the permanent, the present work reinforces painting’s singular capacity to preserve and transport.
Executed at a refined point in Hodgkin’s career, Sunset in Naples reflects the stylistic maturity and expressive vitality that secured his international recognition. In 1976 he was the subject of his first major museum exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain, and he was appointed CBE the following year. In 1984, Hodgkin would represent Britain at the XLI Venice Biennale, a defining milestone that firmly established his standing on the international stage. Completed in 1982, the present work was exhibited that same year at L.A. Louver, where it was acquired and has remained in the same private collection ever since. Returning to view for the first time since the year of its completion, the painting retains the vivid immediacy Hodgkin so prized: a few incandescent passages of colour that, as he once wrote, are enough to make him feel he is there once more.
I have a feeling that it is only in the Anglo-Saxon world that sunsets are to be described as ‘vulgar’. And I think the reason why is because of the connotations of the colour of sunset. Sunsets, after all, are very red, very orange, which at the red end of the spectrum are the colours of tumescence - Howard Hodgkin
This striking, intimately scaled painting is a jewel from Howard Hodgkin’s sustained meditations on Naples. In Hodgkin’s deeply idiosyncratic pictorial language, Naples is not merely a place but a state of mind; a vessel for indulgence, desire, and reverie. At its apex burns a molten Italian sun, bleeding gold into a deepening cadmium-orange haze that sears the sky with heat. Along the upper edge, a whisper of blue signals the approaching dusk. Two swathes of turquoise-green, smeared along either side, frame and steady the composition, while the wooden frame itself, streaked with black pigment, spills into the picture plane. Its darkened borders intimate the encroachment of the night. The central tricolour division dominates, holding these chromatic extremes in taut balance, the entire surface charged with emotional voltage.
For an artist so frequently described as a painter of emotional states, this remark is characteristically pointed. It acknowledges the sensual charge of colour while confronting the cultural unease that such intensity can provoke. Unapologetic in their saturation, Hodgkin’s sunsets distil and savour his most precious associations with place. In Venice Sunset (1989), he similarly explores the intensity of hue, balancing sensuality with contemplation. Emerging from a period of profound personal transition – marked by his separation from his wife in the mid-1970s and his growing acknowledgement of his homosexuality – Sunset in Naples precedes the enduring partnership he would form with the writer Anthony Peattie in 1984. Seen in the context of the artist’s life at this juncture, the chromatic temperature of the present work acquires an unavoidable eroticism. In the related and suggestively titled Waking Up in Naples (1980-84), the southern Italian setting is again alluded to as a site for renewed desire and emotional discovery.
As he wrote to John Elderfield after a visit to Naples, ‘…two or three smudges of blue and green paint rubbed into this wooden panel, and I begin to feel I am there’ (H. Hodgkin, London, 13 February 1995, in J. Elderfield and H. Hodgkin, ‘An Exchange’, Howard Hodgkin Paintings, London, 1995, p. 73). The remark is disarmingly simple, yet it cuts to the core of his practice: painting as an instrument of return. Profoundly sincere in his work, Hodgkin laboured slowly and deliberately, often over years, adjusting colour and structure until a memory settled into its final form. The wooden frames, which, as John McEwen observed, offered something ‘contrarily solid and relatively indestructible’, were not incidental but essential: durable, resistant surface for impressions by nature fleeting (J. McEwen, exhibition catalogue, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings 1973-84, British Pavilion, XLI Venice Biennale, 1984, p. 9). Here, the frame acts as both protector and container, holding the warmth of remembered experience within its fixed embrace. In this tension between the ephemeral and the permanent, the present work reinforces painting’s singular capacity to preserve and transport.
Executed at a refined point in Hodgkin’s career, Sunset in Naples reflects the stylistic maturity and expressive vitality that secured his international recognition. In 1976 he was the subject of his first major museum exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain, and he was appointed CBE the following year. In 1984, Hodgkin would represent Britain at the XLI Venice Biennale, a defining milestone that firmly established his standing on the international stage. Completed in 1982, the present work was exhibited that same year at L.A. Louver, where it was acquired and has remained in the same private collection ever since. Returning to view for the first time since the year of its completion, the painting retains the vivid immediacy Hodgkin so prized: a few incandescent passages of colour that, as he once wrote, are enough to make him feel he is there once more.